1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing control technique.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is known a printing system which prints on a paper medium by transmitting a print job generated by a host computer to a printer and processing it by the printer. In the printing system, for example, when the user designates printing, the Microsoft OS “Windows®” allows him to view the processing status of a print job through the graphical user interface of the print queue. The user can know whether the print job has been queued in the print queue and output from the print queue.
Even if the user can know that a print job has been output from the print queue, he cannot know whether processing of the print job is complete. For example, the user cannot know, from the print queue, the status of print processing such as rendering or the end of the print processing for a print job output from the print queue.
Further, once a print job is queued, the settings (print job settings) of the print job such as the copy count cannot be changed.
As a solution to these problems, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-11469 discloses a job monitoring technique using a language monitor. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-11469 discloses a configuration which makes an output from the print queue coincide with an actual printout. In this configuration, as print job monitoring processing, until processing of a print job is complete, the language monitor notifies the print queue that transmission is not complete even if the transmission is complete.
There is also proposed a method of displaying job information held in a language monitor by a status display application. However, the user must check both the print queue and application in order to check or operate a print job. This operation is complicated.
In Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-11469, the display of a print job is limited to a job requiring monitoring processing, so a list of print jobs cannot be displayed. In addition, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-11469 does not mention change of the settings of a queued print job.